Long live the...

Engine

Unity

Language

Project Type

Game Jam

Role

Programmer

Duration

30 Hours

For this game jam, I worked as the main programmer in a team of 5 (1 artist, 2 designers, and 2 programmers).

The theme of this jam was 'Change', as such we decided to put this in the context of revolutionary change; In “Long Live The...”, not only does the narrative involve creating a change by rising against an evil regime, but the players objective is to primarily interact with the neutral citizens of the city by changing their minds on the society they live in. By being recruited, the citizens also change the environment by making parts of the city more visible - thus, change helps the player win the game!

We were also driven to provide an experience that is easy to pick up and enjoy by all ages by providing simple controls. Recruiting citizens with a single tap and quick reflexes to dodge the police is all that’s needed to join the Revolution!

The player taps on neutral citizens to recruit and direct them to revolutionary activities - all the while evading the police presence patrolling the city. If any of the three controllable units are caught, the player loses control of them. If all three are caught, the game is over. If the player braves the foggy night and converts enough people, they win the game. This is a fast-paced game of multitasking and stealth!

You control the playable characters by clicking on them, to move them you click where you want them to go. They will then use the Unity's Navmesh Agent scripts to find the path to that destination.

To simulate a fog of war type effect, I added a dark plane above the map, for the 'fog' and added a sphere to each character with a depthmask shader on it, resulting in a 'hole' through the fog plane.

The enemies in the game are the police which will patrol the city on a set path. During this patrol they can be in 1 of 3 states (which is shown by the colour of their torchlight);

- Patrolling (Blue), their default state where it will path-find through their route (which is created by the little cubes).

- Chasing (Red), when they see an agent, they will pathfind towards it.

- Searching (Orange), where it will spin in a circle.

Its vision is created from a long box collider, if an agent enters this it will raycast towards them to check if they have a clear line of sight.

When it reaches each route node, it has a random chance of entering the Searching state and/or reversing its movement direction.

This is how the agents interact with the NPCs in the game. When the agent is selected they can click on an NPC which will make that NPC stop moving, when the agent reaches them the NPC will be converted to the cause. The NPC will then go on its merry way, however, its conviction to the cause will waver over time causing their field of view to decrees. At this point, the agent must interact with them again.